It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize from the PCT that the Rays are a better team than the Orioles. And GB should show that. It doesn’t. Instead, it shows them as even.

There are a couple of ways to calculate GB, but the way I learned back in the early 70’s is to 1) subtract the bottom team’s wins from the top team’s wins, 2) subtract the top team’s losses from the bottom team’s losses, 3) add up those two figures and divide by 2. In this case you’d get 2 as the GB of the Orioles. This is not what USAToday shows.

The point of GB is to measure the minimum number of games for the bottom team to “catch” the top team. In this case, if the teams play 2 games each, and the Rays lose both, and the Orioles win both, they’ll each have the same record of 68-56.

* I really don’t pay much attention to this, but I noticed it on Monday in the local paper’s reprint, and it’s still there on Tuesday in the USAToday website.

In class last year, during the first week, a student who had read something on my blog outside of class came to class the next day and asked what one of the words I used meant.

I gave him some good advice. Open Google, and type the keyword define and the word you don’t know, and it will give you definitions. He didn’t know this, and he was an A student. Here’s what I got when I looked it up in Google.

N.B.: Fungible has been a word on the move the last 2 decades. When I first heard it perhaps 25 years ago, it wasn’t in even in the first dictionary I looked at. Now, it’s such a useful word for an interesting property that there is a Wikipedia page for fungibility. Even though the word “fungibility” is not in Microsoft’s default dictionary for Windows Live Writer (which I use to write these posts).

BTW: If you find dictionary definitions to dry to be useful, you should try Wordnik, where people can post examples of the actual usage for words. It has a page for both fungible and for fungibility.

FWIW: I don’t use dictionaries any more. I packed up all the ones in the house and office about 2 years ago. They’re in storage, but I haven’t gotten them out once.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

Let’s call what people do with their businesses “Build That”, and what the government does “Make That Happen”.

What Obama’s statement doesn’t say is that a person can also choose “Don’t Build That”, and that government can choose “Make Something Different Happen”.

There are actually 4 possibilities, and Obama is just talking about one of them:

Make That Happen

Make Something Else Happen

Build That

1

2

Don’t Build That

3

4

Obama’s statement suggests that he sees cell 1.

Yet, even a businessperson who admits there is some merit in Obama’s claim is probably scared of cell 2. They’ve built a business, and perhaps the government did make that happen, but it isn’t at all clear their situation can be improved if the government sets out to make something else happen. The track record of our government just hasn’t been very solid for a couple of generations.

It gets worse in cell 3. If we take Obama’s statement at face value that government policy helped make businesses happen, how on earth do we rectify the behavior of the part of the population who didn’t build anything at all? It’s one thing to give someone help, see them succeed, and ask them to contribute back; it’s quite another to give someone help, have them go blow the cash on hats, and not even think to ask for anything in return.

I do know that Obama gets cell 4: he wants government to do something different to help those who haven’t been able to build anything. Who wouldn’t? Well, maybe someone who’s on the hook to pay for it.

And here’s where the thinking gets really muddy. Obama wants to make those in cell 1 worse off so that his shift to cell 4 turns out better. But what could be better for Obama than a future where more people build businesses that the government helped make happen? In short, his plan is take from cell 1 now to fund cell 4 to make cell 1 bigger off in the future? Huh?

I can’t make this stuff up, so how does Obama? By seeing cells 1 and 4 as the only possibilities. Meanwhile, cells 2 and 3 are always there, but are not seen by Obama.

… "Gliding" is too passive a term to describe what squid do when they leave the ocean for the air: "flight" is more fitting.

"From our observations it seemed like squid engage in behaviors to prolong their flight," Maciá says. "One of our co-authors saw them actually flapping their fins. Some people have seen them jetting water while in flight…”

Flapping qualifies as a whole lot better than what “flying” fish do, IMHO.

Right now I think this is nuts. But, my wife hasn’t been pregnant in 10 years. And I still think the first ultrasound of our first kid is amazing … his profile is still the same. So, if it were me, and the price was a bit lower, I’d probably do this.

P.S. I wrote this on Thursday. On Friday I went to my wife’s lab; she needed an extra set of hands to do some prep work. She works in a cadaver lab. And on the shelves are models of fetuses. It’s not my cup of tea, but I’ve no doubt that she’ll be 3-D printing analogs of fetuses in a few years.

Genesis

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